Phase transformations are among the most intriguing and technologically useful phenomena in materials, particularly with regard to controlling microstructure. After a review of thermodynamics, this book has chapters on Brownian motion and the diffusion equation, diffusion in solids based on transition-state theory, spinodal decomposition, nucleation and growth, instabilities in solidification, and diffusionless transformations. Each chapter includes exercises whose solutions are available in a separate manual.
IOP Concise Physics
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IOP Concise Physics developed with Morgan & Claypool Publishers (M&C), focuses on shorter texts in rapidly advancing areas or topics where an introductory text is more appropriate.
Recently published All books in collection
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Authors: Gregory A DiLisi and James J DeLuca
Published September 2019
Practically every display technology in use today relies on the flat, energy-efficient construction made possible by liquid crystals. These displays provide visually-crisp, vibrantly-colored images that a short time ago were thought only possible in science fiction. Liquid crystals are known mainly for their use in display technologies, but they also provide many diverse and useful applications: adaptive optics, electro-optical devices, films, lasers, photovoltaics, privacy windows, skin cleansers and soaps, and thermometers. The striking images of liquid crystals changing color under polarized lighting conditions are even on display in many museums and art galleries—true examples of 'science meeting art'. Although liquid crystals provide us with visually stunning displays, fascinating applications, and are a rich and fruitful source of interdisciplinary research, their full potential may yet remain untapped.
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The transport of electric charge through most materials is well described in terms of their electronic band structure. The present book deals with two cases where the charge transport in a solid is not described by the simple band structure picture of the solid. These cases are related to the phenomena of the quantum Hall effect and superconductivity.
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Author: Richard A Dunlap
Published September 2019
The first part of this book overviews the physics of lasers and describes some of the more common types of lasers and their applications. Applications of lasers include CD/DVD players, laser printers and fiber optic communication devices. Part II of this book describes the phenomenon of Bose–Einstein condensation. The experimental techniques used to create a Bose–Einstein condensate provide an interesting and unconventional application of lasers; that is, the cooling and confinement of a dilute gas at very low temperature.
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Author: Jean Berthier, Ashleigh B Theberge and Erwin Berthier
Published August 2019
Open microfluidics—the study of microflows having a boundary with surrounding air—encompasses different aspects such as paper or thread-based microfluidics, droplet microfluidics and open-channel microfluidics. Open-channel microflow is a flow at the micro-scale, guided by solid structures, and having at least a free boundary (with air or vapor) other than the advancing meniscus. This book is devoted to the study of open-channel microfluidics which—contrary to paper or thread or droplet microfluidics—is still very sparsely documented, but bears many new applications in biology, biotechnology, medicine, material and space sciences. Capillarity being the principal force triggering an open microflow, the principles of capillarity are first recalled. The onset of open-channel microflow is next analyzed and the fundamental notion of generalized Cassie angle—the apparent contact angle which accounts for the presence of air—is presented. The theory of the dynamics of open-channel microflows is then developed, using the notion of averaged friction length which accounts for the presence of air along the boundaries of the flow domain. Different channel morphologies are studied and geometrical features such as valves and capillary pumps are examined. An introduction to two-phase open-channel microflows is also presented showing that immiscible plugs can be transported by an open-channel flow. Finally, a selection of interesting applications in the domains of space, materials, medicine and biology is presented, showing the potentialities of open-channel microfluidics.
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Author: John Mitrofanis
Published August 2019
Parkinson's disease is a neurological disorder with cardinal motor signs of resting tremor, bradykinesia and lead-pipe rigidity. In addition, many patients display non-motor symptoms, including a diminished sensation of smell, gastrointestinal problems, various disorders of sleep and some cognitive impairment. These clinical features manifest after a progressive death of many dopaminergic neurones in the brain. This book focuses on two therapies that are readily available for the patients of today. They involve the use of exercise and light (i.e. photobiomodulation, the use of red to infrared light therapy on body tissues).
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Semiconductors and Modern Electronics is a brief introduction to the physics behind semiconductor technologies. Chuck Winrich, a physics professor at Babson College, explores the topic of semiconductors from a qualitative approach to understanding the theories and models used to explain semiconductor devices. Applications of semiconductors are explored and understood through the models developed in the book. The qualitative approach in this book is intended to bring the advanced ideas behind semiconductors to the broader audience of students who will not major in physics.
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Author: Tapio Simula
Published August 2019
Vortices comprising swirling motion of matter are observable in classical systems at all scales ranging from atomic size to the scale of galaxies. In quantum mechanical systems, such vortices are robust entities whose behaviours are governed by the strict rules of topology. The physics of quantum vortices is pivotal to the basic science of quantum turbulence and high-temperature superconductors, and underpins emerging quantum technologies including topological quantum computation. This handbook is aimed at providing a dictionary-style portal to the fascinating quantum world of vortices.
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Author: Gregory A DiLisi
Published August 2019
Classical Mechanics teaches readers how to solve physics problems; in other words, how to put math and physics together to obtain a numerical or algebraic result and then interpret these results physically. These skills are important and will be needed in more advanced science and engineering courses. However, more important than developing problem-solving skills and physical-interpretation skills, the main purpose of this multi-volume series is to survey the basic concepts of classical mechanics and to provide the reader with a solid understanding of the foundational content knowledge of classical mechanics. Classical Mechanics: Conservation laws and rotational motion covers the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum, which are crucial concepts in any physics course. It also introduces the concepts of center-of-mass and rotational motion.
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Author: Gregory A DiLisi
Published August 2019
Classical Mechanics teaches readers how to solve physics problems; in other words, how to put math and physics together to obtain a numerical or algebraic result and then interpret these results physically. These skills are important and will be needed in more advanced science and engineering courses. However, more important than developing problem-solving skills and physical-interpretation skills, the main purpose of this multi-volume series is to survey the basic concepts of classical mechanics and to provide the reader with a solid understanding of the foundational content knowledge of classical mechanics. Classical Mechanics: The universal law of gravitation focuses on the notion that forces act through their associated fields, which is first introduced when discussing Newton's universal law of gravitation. A huge conceptual leap is required from the reader: an object can cause another object to move without even touching it. This is a difficult concept to reconcile with our everyday experiences but it makes perfect sense when we realize that is exactly how the Earth acts on us. Gravity is able to pull on us even though we are not in direct contact with the Earth. Also, the concept of super-position (and when it is applicable) is introduced. Super-position is crucial to the development of problem-solving skills so it will be illustrated in a number of example problems.
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Author: Gregory A DiLisi
Published July 2019
Classical Mechanics teaches readers how to solve physics problems; in other words, how to put math and physics together to obtain a numerical or algebraic result and then interpret these results physically. These skills are important and will be needed in more advanced science and engineering courses. However, more important than developing problem-solving skills and physical-interpretation skills, the main purpose of this multi-volume series is to survey the basic concepts of classical mechanics and to provide the reader with a solid understanding of the foundational content knowledge of classical mechanics. Classical Mechanics: Newton's laws and uniform circular motion focuses on the question: 'Why does an object move?'. To answer that question, we turn to Isaac Newton. The hallmark of any good introductory physics series is its treatment of Newton's laws of motion. These laws are difficult concepts for most readers for a number of reasons: they have a reputation as being difficult concepts; they require the mastery of multiple sub-skills; and problems involving these laws can be cast in a variety of formats.
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Author: Gregory A DiLisi
Published July 2019
Classical Mechanics teaches readers how to solve physics problems; in other words, how to put math and physics together to obtain a numerical or algebraic result and then interpret these results physically. These skills are important and will be needed in more advanced science and engineering courses. However, more important than developing problem-solving skills and physical-interpretation skills, the main purpose of this multi-volume series is to survey the basic concepts of classical mechanics and to provide the reader with a solid understanding of the foundational content knowledge of classical mechanics. Classical Mechanic: Kinematics and uniformly accelerated motion focuses on the difference between asking, 'How does an object move?' and 'Why does an object move?'. This distinction requires a paradigm shift in the mind of the reader. Therefore, the reader must train themselves to clarify, 'Am I trying to describe how the object moves or why the object moves?'.
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Classical Mechanics teaches readers how to solve physics problems; in other words, how to put math and physics together to obtain a numerical or algebraic result and then interpret these results physically. These skills are important and will be needed in more advanced science and engineering courses. However, more important than developing problem-solving skills and physical-interpretation skills, the main purpose of this multi-volume series is to survey the basic concepts of classical mechanics and to provide the reader with a solid understanding of the foundational content knowledge of classical mechanics. Classical Mechanics: Tools and vectors is simply about transmitting information. The conventions used to transmit certain types of numerical information are crucial concepts that must be addressed at the outset of any series on classical mechanics by discussing scalars versus vectors for example.
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When you hear about the latest physics breakthroughs on the news, or attend university or college physics courses, it can be easy to think of physics as just an academic subject. But physics does much more than describe how matter and energy behave. It reveals how almost everything around us and, even, within us works. In fact, physics-based technologies are integral to many of the work and leisure activities we carry out everyday without giving science a second thought.
This book explores the use of physics in various sports. We will see how professional athletes, coaches and amateurs in different sports use physics, and physics-based technologies, to participate in that sport and raise their performance levels as high as possible.
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Author: Matt Marone
Published July 2019
The combination of Asian studies and Physics is a unique blend rarely found in a Western scientific classroom. The field of Asian studies is rapidly growing and branching out into scientific realms. At the same time, there is a growing need to educate our young people in science, technology and mathematics (STEM). This book presents scientific principles through the technology and inventions of ancient China. It explores these ideas in their historical context, as well as through the lens of current scientific understanding.
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The Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), is the cornerstone of non-proliferation and disarmament efforts. Yet its negotiation and success were not inevitable. This book aims to address the developments that led to the negotiation of the treaty, examine its implementation, and address challenges that the NPT faces going forward.
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Authors: Sebastian Deffner and Steve Campbell
Published July 2019
This book introduces the emerging field of quantum thermodynamics, with a focus on its relation to quantum information and its implications for quantum computers and next generation quantum technologies. Aimed at graduate level physics students with a working knowledge of quantum mechanics and statistical physics this text introduces the reader to some more state-of-the-art topics in this exciting and rapidly developing research field.
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Authors: Ronald S Calinger, Ekaterina (Katya) Denisova and Elena N Polyakhova
Published June 2019
Leonhard Euler's Letters to a German Princess on Various Subjects in Physics and Philosophy is a milestone in the history of physics textbooks and the instruction of women in the sciences. It also covers views of its author on epistemology, religion, and innovations in scientific equipment, including telescopes and microscopes. Today, 250 years later, we study this work of Euler's as a foundation for the history of physics teaching and analyze the letters from an historical and pedagogical point of view.
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Authors: Navid Rabiee, Mohammad Rabiee, Mojtaba Bagherzadeh and Michael R Hamblin
Published June 2019
This book provides a general introduction to nanogels, and designs of various stimuli-sensitive nanogels that are able to control drug release in response to specific stimuli. Nanogels are three-dimensional nanosized networks that formed by physically or chemically crosslinking polymers. They have highly interesting properties such as biocompatibility, high stability, particle size adjustment, drug loading capability and modification of the surface for active targeting. They can respond to stimuli which results in the controlled release of drug and targeting of the site.
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This book explores whether physics points to a reductive or an emergent structure of the world and proposes a physics-motivated conception of emergence that leaves behind many of the problematic intuitions shaping the philosophical conceptions. Examining several detailed case studies reveals results that point to stability conditions playing a crucial, though underappreciated, role in the physics of emergence. This contextual emergence has thought-provoking consequences for physics and beyond.
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Authors: Leo Rodriguez and Shanshan Rodriguez
Published May 2019
Holographic dualities are at the forefront of contemporary physics research, peering into the fundamental nature of our universe and providing best attempt answers to humankind's bold questions about basic physical phenomena. Yet, the concepts, ideas and mathematical rigors associated with these dualities have long been reserved for the specific field researchers and experts. This book shatters this long held paradigm by bringing several aspects of holography research into the class room, starting at the college physics level and moving up from there.
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Maple is a comprehensive symbolic mathematics application which is well suited for demonstrating physical science topics and solving associated problems. This book records the author's journey of discovery; he was familiar with SMath but not with Maple and set out to learn the more advanced application. It leads readers through the basic Maple features with physical science worked examples, giving them a firm base on which to build if more complex features interest them.
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Author: Bruce Cameron Reed
Published May 2019
The development of man's understanding of planetary motions is the crown jewel of Newtonian mechanics. This book offers a concise but self-contained handbook-length treatment of this historically important topic for students at about the third-year-level of an undergraduate physics curriculum. After opening with a review of Kepler's three laws of planetary motion, it proceeds to the analyze the general dynamics of 'central force' orbits in spherical coordinates, how elliptical orbits satisfy Newton's gravitational law, and how the geometry of ellipses relates to physical quantities, such as energy and momentum. Exercises are provided, and derivations are set up in such a way that readers can gain analytic practice by filling in the missing steps. A brief bibliography lists sources for readers who wish to pursue further study on their own.
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This book gives a rigorous, physics focused, introduction to set theory that is geared towards natural science majors. We present the science major with a robust introduction to set theory, focusing on the specific knowledge and skills that will unavoidably be needed in calculus topics and natural science topics in general, rather than taking a philosophical-math-fundamental oriented approach that is commonly found in set theory textbooks.
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Nanomaterials and nanostructures are the original product of nanotechnology, and the key building blocks for enabling technologies. In this context, this book presents a concise overview of the synthesis and characterization methods of nanomaterials and nanostructures, while integrating facets of physics, chemistry, and engineering. The book summarizes the fundamentals and technical approaches in synthesis, and processing of nanostructures and nanomaterials, giving the reader a systematic and quick picture of the field.
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This book uses a hands-on approach to nonlinear dynamics using commonly available software, including the free dynamical systems software Xppaut, Matlab (or its free cousin, Octave) and the Maple symbolic algebra system. Detailed instructions for various common procedures, including bifurcation analysis using the version of AUTO embedded in Xppaut, are provided. This book also provides a survey that can be taught in a single academic term covering a greater variety of dynamical systems (discrete versus continuous time, finite versus infinite-dimensional, dissipative versus conservative) than is normally seen in introductory texts. Numerical computation and linear stability analysis are used as unifying themes throughout the book. Despite the emphasis on computer calculations, theory is not neglected, and fundamental concepts from the field of nonlinear dynamics such as solution maps and invariant manifolds are presented.
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Authors: Daniel C Boice and Thomas Hockey
Published April 2019
The purpose of this book is to bring comets into the living rooms of general households, to familiarize politicians with these fascinating objects when they ponder funding for comet research, to teach children and young students and to provide teaching tools about these very unusual objects in our skies. The presentation is very comprehensive in its description of orbits around the Sun, the development of the coma (escaping atmosphere) from a comet's nucleus and source of all activities, various types of comet tails, trailing as well as leading as a comet orbits our Sun, ancient beliefs and explanations of these phenomena and the most recent discovery of the first interstellar comet.
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This book provides an introduction to topological matter with a focus on insulating bulk systems. A number of prerequisite concepts and tools are first laid out, including the notion of symmetry transformations, the band theory of semiconductors and aspects of electronic transport. The main part of the book discusses realistic models for both time-reversal-preserving and -violating topological insulators, as well as their characteristic responses to external perturbations. Special emphasis is given to the study of the anomalous electric, thermal, and thermoelectric transport properties, the theory of orbital magnetisation, and the polar Kerr effect. The topological models studied throughout this book become unified and generalised by means of the tenfold topological-classification framework and the respective systematic construction of topological invariants. This approach is further extended to topological superconductors and topological semimetals. This book covers a wide range of topics and aims at the transparent presentation of the technical aspects involved. For this purpose, homework problems are also provided in dedicated Hands-on sections. Given its structure and the required background level of the reader, this book is particularly recommended for graduate students or researchers who are new to the field.
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The effect which now bears his name, was discovered in 1958 by Rudolf Mössbauer at the Technical University of Munich. It soon became apparent that Mössbauer spectroscopy had applications in such diverse fields as general relativity, solid state physics, chemistry, materials science, biology, medical physics, archeology and art. The present volume reviews the historical development of the Mössbauer effect, the experimental details, the basic physics of hyperfine interactions and some of the numerous applications of Mössbauer effect spectroscopy.
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Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, published in 1915, made a remarkable prediction: gravitational radiation. Just like light (electromagnetic radiation), gravity could travel through space as a wave and affect any objects it encounters by alternately compressing and expanding them. However, there was a problem. The force of gravity is around a trillion, trillion, trillion times weaker than electromagnetism so the calculated compressions and expansions were incredibly small, even for gravity waves resulting from a catastrophic astrophysical event such as a supernova explosion in our own galaxy. Discouraged by this result, physicists and astronomers didn't even try to detect these tiny, tiny effects for over 50 years. Then, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, two events occurred which started the hunt for gravity waves in earnest. The first was a report of direct detection of gravity waves thousands of times stronger than even the most optimistic calculation. Though ultimately proved wrong, this result started scientists thinking about what instrumentation might be necessary to detect these waves. The second was an actual, though indirect, detection of gravitational radiation due to the effects it had on the period of rotation of two 'neutron stars' orbiting each other. In this case, the observations were in exact accord with predictions from Einstein's theory, which confirmed that a direct search might ultimately be successful. Nevertheless, it took another 40 years of development of successively more sensitive detectors before the first real direct effects were observed in 2015, 100 years after gravitational waves were first predicted. This is the story of that hunt, and the insight it is producing into an array of topics in modern science, from the creation of the chemical elements to insights into the properties of gravity itself.
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B Factories are particle colliders at which specific subatomic particles—B mesons—are produced abundantly. The purpose is to study the properties of their decays in great detail in order to shed light on a mystery of eminently larger scale: why do we live in a universe composed of anti-matter? This book introduces readers to the physics laws of the CP asymmetry, touching on experimental requirements needed to perform such measurements at the subatomic level, and illustrating the main findings of the contemporary B Factories.
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Author: Edward Wolf
Published April 2019
Credible predictions for sea level rise by the year 2100 range from 12 inches to above 6 feet. Study of the Earth's geologic history links sea level rise to temperature rise. Engineering the Earth's solar input appears increasingly attractive and practical as a means to lower Earth's temperature, and thus, to lower sea level. The accompanying lower global temperature would reduce the severity of extreme weather, and restore habitability to lethally hot parts of the world.
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Author: Michael Keidar, Dayun Yan and Jonathan H Sherman
Published March 2019
Cold atmospheric plasma (CAP) has emerged as a possible new modality for cancer treatment. This book provides a comprehensive introduction into fundamentals of the CAP and plasma devices used in plasma medicine. An analysis of the mechanisms of plasma interaction with cancer and normal cells including description of possible mechanisms of plasma selectivity is included. Recent advances in the field, the primary challenges and future directions are presented.
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Author: Armin Kargol
Published March 2019
All living matter is comprised of cells and, when studied by different sciences, they are seen differently. From a physics standpoint, one of the main questions is the physical movement of all these molecules between organelles within the cell, as well as their exchange with the extracellular medium. The aim of this book is to look into the basic physical phenomena occurring in cells.
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